On this day in 1989, after waging war for approximately nine years, the Soviet Union was defeated in Afghanistan, with 14,453 Soviet soldiers killed and 53,753 wounded. The Soviet Union officially collapsed two years later on December 26, 1991.
A decade later, on October 7, 2001, the United States decided that it wanted to try its luck in Afghanistan, and after also suffering defeat is now on its own path to collapse.